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DNAeXplained
Personal blog · dna-explained.comsciencehistory
DNAeXplained is a personal blog at dna-explained.com about science and history. Since 2014, 4 different Hacker News readers have linked it 5 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-25, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Genetic genealogy blog linked for explanations of DNA concepts such as segment size and partial matching, and for research on haplogroups and human population history.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Discovering Your Ancestors - One Gene at a Time
What Hacker News says?
Well, DNA matching is crapshoot and hazardous toward the innocents. We can still find unrelated folks with partial match by the virtue of segmentation. https://dna-explained.com/2017/01/19/concepts-segment-size-l...
Comment linking /2017/01/19/concepts-segment-size-legitimate-and-false-matches/
on “Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA testing kit”Submitted My DNA has been kidnapped and I’ve been genetically raped as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThat’s actually reverse causation - it’s not that we killed “everyone else”, it’s that everyone still alive became “us” after we gave up killing them and interbred with them instead. The British were going around genociding all over the place until pretty recently but now they’ve decided the Irish are human too. Homo sapiens is still expanding even: https://dna-explained.com/2012/11/16/the-new-root-haplogroup...
Comment linking /2012/11/16/the-new-root-haplogroup-a00/
on “DALL·E Now Available Without Waitlist”Well, the other notable fact about this story is it's Blackstone, which has a record of giving managers a lot of leeway to do anything to juice the numbers. Two examples: 1) Hiring 14 year old slaughterhouse workers ( https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/pssi-hired-same-child-t... ) 2) Gamifying of one its genealogy websites that tracked cemetery markers, which resulted in people "claiming" victims of mass shootings…
Comment linking /2022/06/02/find-a-grave-owned-by-ancestry-seriously-just-stop-incentivizing-the-creation-of-memorials-of-the-recently-deceased/
on “A Blackstone real estate company exposed SSN digits, DOBs, addresses and more”There's a similar phenomenon on "Find-A-Grave" ( https://www.findagrave.com ) which was a quiet old-school genealogy site used by family historians and researchers until private equity took it over via Ancestry.com. The current PE owner, Blackstone, installed an ex-Facebook exec as CEO of Ancestry/Find A Grave who instituted a gamification system. Thanks to this engagement tweak, many deaths from accidents to natura…
Comment linking /2022/06/02/find-a-grave-owned-by-ancestry-seriously-just-stop-incentivizing-the-creation-of-memorials-of-the-recently-deceased/
on “The cottage industry of YouTube obituary pirates”